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Will Technology Make Information Security Impossible? And Must Technology Be Invented Just Because We Can?

Thoughts Occasioned by Brunner’s “The Productions of Time” and Asimov’s “The Dead Past”

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Book cover Security Protocols XXIII (Security Protocols 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9379))

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Abstract

John Brunner postulates a technology that can record the thoughts and emotions generated by the human brain during sleep, and replay them on demand later for a third party. Isaac Asimov describes a device that can look into the past and display what actually happened. These fictional inventions raise interesting questions about the way we actually handle confidentiality and integrity of information at present, and suggest new threats and countermeasures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Traditionally all (or almost all) master criminals are male, Elementary’s Jamie Moriarty being a notable exception.

  2. 2.

    Jikzi (LNCS 1796, 22–47); DODA (LNCS 2845, 74–95); or a slight re-purposing of the Eternity Service: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/rja14/eternity/eternity.html.

  3. 3.

    Whereas even a low-bandwidth covert channel from the attacker’s future into their past breaks most security protocols.

  4. 4.

    Unless this was done before the inventions can be deployed, whence the term “Vintage”.

  5. 5.

    Indeed, it could help solve the data integrity problem, providing we make strong assumptions about the integrity of the data supplied by the chronoscope. Such assumptions are unnecessary for secret sniffing, because in current protocols a correct guess for a secret can usually be verified independently of how the guess was obtained.

References

  1. Asimov, I.: The Dead Past. In: Earth is Room Enough, Panther Books Ltd, London (1956). Reprint 9–52 (1971)

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  2. Brunner, J.: The Productions of Time. Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth (1967). Reprint 1970

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  3. Christianson, B., Shafarenko, A.: Vintage bit cryptography. In: Christianson, B., Crispo, B., Malcolm, J.A., Roe, M. (eds.) Security Protocols. LNCS, vol. 5087, pp. 261–265. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

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  4. ETH. Controlling genes with your thoughts (2014). https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2014/11/controlling-genes-with-thoughts.html. Accessed 14 November 2014 (formal publication in Nature Communications online at http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141111/ncomms6392/full/ncomms6392.html)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hertfordshire College Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, AL10 9AB, UK

    Paul Wernick & Bruce Christianson

Authors
  1. Paul Wernick
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  2. Bruce Christianson
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Correspondence to Bruce Christianson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom

    Bruce Christianson

  2. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Petr Švenda

  3. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Vashek Matyáš

  4. University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom

    James Malcolm

  5. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Frank Stajano

  6. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

    Jonathan Anderson

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Wernick, P., Christianson, B. (2015). Will Technology Make Information Security Impossible? And Must Technology Be Invented Just Because We Can?. In: Christianson, B., Švenda, P., Matyáš, V., Malcolm, J., Stajano, F., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXIII. Security Protocols 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26096-9_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26096-9_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26095-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26096-9

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